Can getTalent help your company hire better people?

A start-up that Viacom, JetBlue, and Kaiser Permanent all do business with could help your company as well. Big companies don’t like to take a chance with new ventures — since the odds of failure are so high. So why are these three were willing to overcome such concerns? The company getTalent helps them win the war for talent.

As he explained in a November 20 interview, getTalent CEO Abraham Shafi believes that his company’s software meets a need by companies to develop relationships with talented people. Mr. Shafi noticed that while people are using social media to build and sustain relationships, companies lose that opportunity because of the way they screen out resumes of people applying for scarce job opportunities.

But Mr. Shafi believes that the way talented people approach careers has changed. Rather than staying with a single company and advancing up the ladder of success, talented people change their minds about where they want to work and what they want to do when they get there in pursuit of their “dream job.”

For example, if a talented person decides she wants to work at Google, she may already be working somewhere else, and is eager to establish a relationship with key executives at Google so that when she is ready to move, she will have an ally there who can help her achieve her goals.

Mr. Shafi notes that executive recruiters are his model. He notes that they identify “25 to 100 high potential people and establish and maintain relationships with them throughout their careers.” And these executive recruiters profit each time they help those high potential people land another job higher up on their self-defined ladders of success.

Mr. Shafi thought it would be useful if companies were able to establish relationships with high potential people below that top executive tier. Most companies use Excel spreadsheets or some other software to manage their relationships with talent.

Mr. Shafi says that GetTalent has developed a better solution that “focused on helping companies understand, personally engage, and build real relationships with the tens of thousands and sometimes millions of candidates the companies encounter through deep HR-CRM like software (think SalesForce) that leverages natural language processing, affinity group segmentation, and email marketing.”

For example, Viacom uses the startup’s mobile resume scanning and QR code-creation tools “to sign up potential hires on-the-go and connect with them through tailored email campaigns about new job listings and content about professional development and company culture, which enables Viacom to connect with candidates on a more personal level.” GetTalent receives licensing and member fees from companies and those who use the system.

Mr. Shafi wrote his undergraduate thesis — he created his own major focused on Computer Engineering, Business, and Sociology – through U. Cal. Berkeley’s Interdisciplinary Studies Department on the topic of how society reacts to innovation with a focus on the using of technical innovation in hiring. Mr. Shafi found that social networking was “a crowded market when it came to connecting with your friends and dating but not saturated in corporate hiring.”

During college, Mr. Shafi built a Facebook App that gave him access to HR people in companies where he saw first hand the pain that HR people faced. As he said, they told him, “We get 300,000 resumes for five open jobs — what do we do?” He started working on the current version of the getTalent platform in early 2011 — emerging from stealth mode in October 2012.

And it does not hurt that hiring is a big market that has led investors to assign very high valuations to HR software companies. For example, PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield’s WorkDay went public in October and is now worth $8.3 billion and established companies like IBM and SAP acquired Kexena for $1.3 billion and Success Factors for $3.4 billion, respectively.

SuccessFactors led a $2.6M Series A Funding round for getTalent that competes successfully with LinkedIn, in Mr. Shafi’s view. That’s because the fee that LinkedIn charges users to send emails makes it is too costly for them to build relationships with others in the network.

GetTalent has “over a dozen employees and will be doubling in size over the next two quarters,” according to Mr. Shafi. And it’s “closing a Series B” round of investment. By 2017, Mr. Shafi would like getTalent to be serving 75percent of the 170-million-person U.S. workforce.

And in so doing he hopes to help people get their dream jobs. According to Mr. Shafi, “If someone can use getTalent to establish a relationship with a hiring manager at their dream company, they can ask the manager what skills they need to develop in order to get the dream job there. If the person acquires those skills and can persuade the manager, then getTalent will have helped that person get their dream job.”

While Mr. Shafi’s vision is clear, it remains to be seen whether getTalent can turn that dream into a reality. If he does, he will create happy investors, clients, and employees.